Lead Software Engineer – Middleware & Integration

At Schwab, you’re empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us “challenge the status quo” and transform the finance industry together.

Schwab Technology Services enables the future of how clients manage their money by providing innovative and reliable technology products and services as a part of our ongoing commitment to democratize access to investment and financial planning.

We Believe in the importance of in-office collaboration and fully intend for the selected candidate for this role to work on site in the specified location(s).

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis without employer sponsorship.

Service Integration team in the Enterprise Middleware Organization owns several of the firm's foundational platforms that enable reliable, secure service-to-service communication across the enterprise — including Service Registry, Gateways, and the Enterprise Libraries that thousands of Schwab applications depend on every day. The team is driving mission critical initiatives like API Gateway and Ingress/Egress patterns at Enterprise scale, and Security remediations — work that directly advances Schwab's cloud, resiliency, security, and AI priorities. This is a high-impact opportunity to shape the core integration fabric that powers Schwab's digital ecosystem at scale.Charles Schwab is recruiting a driven, purposeful SME who shares our passion for technical leadership, architecture, and large-scale cross-org execution. This role partners across engineering, infrastructure, and security teams to evolve mission-critical platforms like Enterprise Gateways, and Service Registry in a fast-moving, highly concurrent program landscape. Ideal candidates thrive in ambiguity, enjoy solving complex distributed systems challenges, and are energized by the chance to lead modernization efforts that move Schwab's platform forward.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain core Service Integration platforms — Service Registry, Enterprise Gateways and Libraries — that underpin service-to-service communication across Schwab.
• Lead technical execution of mission critical initiatives including API gateway and ingresses/egress traffic management patterns at enterprise scale.
• Provide architecture leadership across concurrent, cross-org programs, aligning work to cloud modernization, resiliency, security, and AI priorities.
• Drive migration of Legacy Enterprise Gateway workloads onto modern containerized and cloud-native infrastructure, including egress and ingress traffic patterns.
• Evolve the Enterprise Libraries used by thousands of Schwab applications, ensuring backward compatibility, security posture, and ease of adoption.
• Coordinate execution across Service Integration, infrastructure, security, and consuming application teams to unblock dependencies and protect committed milestones.
• Contribute to architecture governance councils, providing expertise on integration patterns, service discovery, and inter-service messaging.
• Drive engineering excellence and operational rigor, including automated testing, reliability, security, and production readiness; proactively identify architectural or systemic risks and lead mitigation efforts before client impact occurs.
• Implement security best practices across Service Integration platforms, including remediation of deprecated cryptographic standards and hardening of service-to-service trust models.
• Leverage AI-powered development tools and contribute to the AI-DLC vision to accelerate delivery, improve code quality, and transform the SDLC pipeline.
• Collaborate effectively with offshore engineering teams, including Schwab India, to coordinate delivery and maintain consistent standards across time zones.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Technology, Engineering, or related discipline.
• 10+ years of software development experience, with strong hands-on engineering contributions and a track record of technical leadership.
• 5+ years of experience designing, building, and operating distributed service integration platforms (e.g., service registries, service buses, messaging/transport frameworks, or enterprise shared libraries).
• Deep expertise in service-to-service communication patterns, service discovery, inter-process messaging, and high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Java or C#/.NET, with strong understanding of enterprise library design, versioning, and backward-compatibility considerations across large consumer bases.
• Hands-on experience modernizing legacy platforms onto cloud-native and containerized infrastructure (e.g., Kubernetes, or equivalent), including traffic migration and capacity planning.
• Solid foundation in security engineering, including cryptographic standards, certificate/key management, and remediation of deprecated protocols (e.g., SHA-1, TLS).
• Proven ability to lead architecture and execution across concurrent, cross-org programs with complex dependencies, using Agile (Scrum/Kanban/Scaled Agile) processes.
• Strong record of operational rigor — automated testing, observability, reliability, and production readiness — with the ability to identify systemic risks and lead mitigation before client impact.
• Demonstrated ability to interact and communicate successfully with business partners, engineering teams, architects, production support, and infrastructure teams.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, AI-based code generation, automated testing frameworks) to enhance productivity and code quality.

• Hands-on experience with GitHub Copilot and other AI-assisted development tools, including custom prompt engineering and workflow integration to accelerate engineering delivery.
• Experience designing and building AI agents and skills (e.g., Copilot extensions, custom skills, MCP servers, or equivalent agent frameworks) to automate engineering and operational workflows.

• Experience working with globally distributed engineering teams, including offshore teams in India, with the ability to collaborate effectively across time zones and cultural contexts.
• Self-starter with strong prioritization, multitasking, and stakeholder-management capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to thrive in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment and to think strategically about modernizing foundational platforms on a scale.

• Familiarity with AI-DLC (AI-Driven Development Lifecycle) practices and contributing to the transformation of the SDLC pipeline through AI-led tooling and automation.
• Experience designing agentic workflows and multi-agent orchestration patterns to solve complex engineering, integration, or operational problems.
• Hands-on experience with IBM DataPower Gateway, including policy configuration, service virtualization, and integration with enterprise service platforms.
• Experience operating and modernizing large-scale messaging, service bus, or ESB-style platforms in regulated financial services environments.
• Exposure to API gateway and increases traffic management patterns at enterprise scale.
• Contributions to internal architecture standards, reference patterns, or open-source projects in the distributed systems or integration space.